Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2018-2019)

Executive Functions (EFs) enable us to resist temptations and automatic impulsive reactions, stay focused, mentally play with ideas, problem-solve, flexibly adjust to changed demands or priorities, and see things from different perspectives; they are crucial for all life’s aspects.

My lab is pushing the frontiers of what is known about the fundamental nature of EFs, what factors help or hinder them and why. EFs depend on a region of the brain, prefrontal cortex (PFC) , and other brain regions interconnected with PFC. We study the fundamental mechanisms by which EFs and PFC are impacted for good or ill (e.g., impaired by stress or improved by programs) including how this differs by sex or genotype. We do not seek to show only that a program improves EFs or that stress impairs them. We seek to understand why .

We aim to dig deeper into better understanding the neurobiological mechanism by which one factor, stress, impairs or improves EFs and how that is moderated by other factors that also affect dopamine levels in PFC. E.g., since the classic Yerkes-Dodson curve was introduced over 100 years ago, no one has investigated exceptions. We found two systematic exceptions that we had predicted. Now we want to test the proposed mechanism that underlay those predictions by pharmacologically modelling the effects of stress on EFs and test our predictions about baseline dopamine levels in PFC differing by estrogen levels and COMT genotype. When most people think about how stress affects the brain to impair cognition, they think about cortisol impairing the hippocampus. Even mild stress, however, disrupts PFC functioning (and EFs) by markedly increasing dopamine levels there, an effect unique to PFC.

We also aim to revolutionize the way people think about improving EFs . Researchers tend to study an aspect of a person in isolation, but our different parts are fundamentally interrelated. People focus on training EFs (or improving aerobic fitness to improve EFs) while ignoring powerful emotional factors that affect EFs. I predict that the most efficient and effective strategy for improving EFs is not to focus only on training EFs. Evidence indicates that EF benefits from an activity may be proportional to how much joy the activity brings. I predict that whether participants are emotionally invested in an activity that requires EFs may be key to whether that activity improves EFs. That is revolutionary because it proposes that addressing emotional needs may be critical to improving cognition (versus the assumption so many make that to most efficiently improve cognition, ignore everything else and focus only on that). This could lead to a paradigm shift in how the field thinks about improving cognitive skills by showing how emotional aspects of a program are key to whether and how much that program improves EFs.

Thus, we aim to get people to think in new ways about how to improve EFs and the mechanisms by which factors such as stress disrupt EFs.